On 25 April 1986, a routine maintenance test was due to take place at Chernobyl’s reactor No 4. The idea was simple: to simulate what would happen during an electrical blackout. In the control room, the senior engineer in charge, Leonid Toptunov, began powering down.
For a few seconds everything was normal. Then there was a roar. The plant, designed to showcase the Soviet Union’s scientific prowess, began to tremble. A shift foreman watched in amazement as the reactor’s fuel caps bounced up and down. Next there was an explosion. The blast destroyed the nuclear core and blew off the plant’s concrete roof.
More than 30 years on, Adam Higginbotham tells the story of the disaster and its gruesome aftermath with thriller-like flair. Midnight in Chernobyl is wonderful and chilling. It is a tale of hubris and doomed ambition, featuring Communist party bosses and hapless engineers, victims and villains, confusion and cover-up.
The tragedy was grimly epic. Those caught up in it are, in Higginbotham’s vivid recreation, never less than human. Mechanical engineer Alexander Yuvchenko was on duty and one of the first to comprehend the scale of the catastrophe. His friend Valery Khodemchuk was missing. Yuvchenko saw rubble, a roofless cavern and thick severed cables swaying with electric sparks.
Far worse was the “shimmering pillar of ethereal blue-white light, reaching straight up into the night sky, disappearing into infinity”. This was the radioactive ionisation of air. The atomic contents from Chernobyl’s reactor spilled into the atmosphere. A malevolent cloud blew across southern Belarus, travelled north-west and ended up in Sweden, causing mystification and panic.
The USSR’s response was wholly inadequate. Chernobyl’s director, Viktor Bryukhanov, sat at his desk in a “bewildered stupor”, Higginbotham suggests, unable to accept the radiation readings reported by his team. Ukraine’s regional chiefs refused to evacuate. And in Moscow the politburo downplayed the crisis, alarmed at losing face before the international community.
It took two days before an order was given to move inhabitants out of Pripyat, the model atomic city built next to the plant. Its citizens were bussed out. A woman came home from a weekend away to find a ghost town: abandoned washing flapping on balconies, empty playgrounds, the barking of dogs. Pets were abandoned; their fur was contaminated with poisonous dust.
Amid bureaucratic incompetence were scenes of stunning bravery. Helicopter pilots dumped bags of sand into the reactor to quell its burning red core. After each trip, crews would strip off their clothes and decontaminate as best they could. When they returned to their aircraft the next day they found the surrounding grass had gone yellow.
Meanwhile, in hospital in Moscow, Toptunov and his comrades perished. They died one by one. Their deaths were agonising. Their white blood cells plunged to zero, hair fell out. Lungs racked by gamma radiation stopped working. Loved ones watched, helpless.
In Manual for Survival, Kate Brown doggedly investigates what happened next. Her starting point is the official death tally from the explosion: Toptunov and 53 others. At the time, international organisations, including the UN, broadly accepted Moscow’s figure. Most of those listed as casualties were workers and firefighters exposed as the plant burned.
Brown is an indomitable researcher. She drives around the affected areas, navigates potholed roads and tracks down survivors. She visits archives. She hangs out with nuclear scientists who venture into the red forest, an intensively radioactive area adjacent to Chernobyl. There they test leaves. Three decades on, pine needles still fail to decompose.
Chernobyl was built amid a vast, watery landscape made up of numerous streams and rivers. This giant swamp, the Pripyat marshes, deterred various 20th-century invaders. It was less successful at keeping out radiation. Contamination seeped into the ecosystem, affecting villagers who picked berries, drank milk from cows and grew their own food.
Brown concludes that the 1986 disaster was not a single event. Rather, she argues, it was a “point on a continuum” that included other nuclear mishaps. The USSR and the US carried out nuclear tests throughout the cold war. Both lied about the toxic consequences. They sought to reassure the public that civilian nuclear energy and the bomb were perfectly safe.
Higginbotham and Brown both chronicle the attempts by brave individuals to expose the truth. One of them was Natalia Lozytska, a Kyiv physicist. By measuring radioactive fallout, she discovered the accident was far worse than the state had acknowledged. She found high levels of caesium-137 and other isotopes. Villagers complained of sore throats, nosebleeds and fainting children.
In 1988, Lozytska disguised herself as a cleaning woman with a mop and sneaked into an international conference on Chernobyl’s medical effects. Soviet officials said there weren’t any. She was about to hand her report to a western doctor when the KGB grabbed her. Overall, Mikhail Gorbachev’s government used secrecy, censorship and fake news to stop information getting out. Data from health studies disappeared.
That the KGB would steal and destroy medical records is hardly surprising. More egregious, in Brown’s view, is the failure by international bodies such as the World Health Organisation to interrogate the consequences. Western experts were condescending towards Soviet doctors. And, with an eye on their own nuclear industry, lowered the numbers of children with thyroid cancer.
There is still no definitive account for how many lives were blighted. Brown estimates 35,000 to 150,000 Chernobyl fatalities. She attributes the rise in thyroid cancers in the US – the numbers tripled between 1974 and 2013 – to half a century of nuclear testing. All of us have been exposed to low-level doses.
Higginbotham and Brown’s books are exemplary studies, written with skill and passion. They avoid the fallacy of a redemptive ending. Some recent studies have claimed that Chernobyl is now a thriving eco-wilderness. Untroubled by man, wolves, elk, bears and rare birds of prey have allegedly come back, with nature rebounding from apocalypse.
Seductive but not true, says Brown. According to Tim Mousseau and Anders Møller, two biologists who have been working since 2000 in the red forest, the zone remains heavily contaminated. The data is uneven. Birch trees that shed their radioactive leaves are in better shape than pines. There are no spiders. And very few bees or fruit flies.
The bodies of mice, leaf litter and the tumours found in migrating barn swallows all tell their own gloomy story. There are, it seems, few grounds for 21st-century optimism. As Møller says: “Every rock we turn over we find damage.”
Luke Harding’s Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House is published by Guardian Faber
• Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham is published by Transworld (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
• Manual for Survival by Kate Brown is published by Penguin (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
